Visualisation tool for representing synthetic facial emotional expressions

Abstract

This paper describes a face-muscle model system capable of emoting avatars in a variety of applications. The presented model produces dynamically changing facial expressions on computer generated faces, using mathematically modeled muscle deformations. The muscle model used to distort sets of vertices in a 3D space, is independent of the geometric model and hence it can be applied to arbitrary face meshes. The work presented here is based on the theories of Keith Waters and Fred Parke as detailed in their book Computer Facial Animation [16]. The original Geoface program was written by Keith Waters in 1994 at Cambridge Research Laboratories [18], and is available from the OpenGL organisation as part of a demo package. © 2008 IEEE.